Blogging

Those comment spammers, dontchya love ‘em? Steven den Beste tried to leave a comment earlier in the day, and his immortal prose was blocked by our MT Blacklist anti-spam utility. Seems that a spammer slipped a little something in the URL line which prevented anyone from using the letters “DE”. Clever of them.

Clever, and yet oh so annoying.

It’s fixed now, but I thought it would be a good idea if I stepped up to the podium and said a few words to our readers.

I’m not an admin here, and I don’t set policy. That means your comment might be deleted due to content and language that Jonathan or Lexington find offensive and there’s not anything I can do about it. (Not that I’d want to, since anything that pisses off Lex or Jonathan automatically pisses me off as well.) But keep in mind that I can get into the Blacklist and make changes. If anyone has any problems they can drop me a line at james_43202@yahoo.com and I’ll get right on it.

That is all. We now return to our regularly scheduled blogging.

As we contemplate turning our garage into an apartment/study, we think about money & life. How long will we use it, how many offspring of offspring will fill this house in the years & holidays between now & the nursing home–or death; well, let’s move on. How many marriages in that backyard? Should we borrow? Should we wait?

And so we make decisions and live with them. We “buy into” them, taking responsibility, recognizing in these choices we impose order (meaning? disorder?) on our lives. This prompts self-consciousness and opposes fatalism. It has similarities with the “break it; own it” mantra cited so often as Powell’s “Pottery Barn strategy.” But it makes the concept personal and even profound. (Not that we fool ourselves; life remains tragic and unpredictable – except for the inevitable death. But if we concentrate on these, we may miss how much we can do.)

Money is a means to an end. A home, a place for our children, a place where we can happily set up our bookcases & computers & live out our lives – that’s the end. I suspect most of us see it as the British saw reason – a means to the end of a good life. Franklin & Thoreau, so different in so many ways, want us to recognize in this exchange our time (life) is one good, money is the means; therefore, we should think a bit about what is worth our life. Of course, for some money is symbol – like Lance Armstrong’s yellow shirt. In the rough and tumble of some exchanges money certifies right decisions, risks taken – the self isn’t certified by the money but by the wisdom of choices which produced it.

Status & our desire for approval are great. While a rich area to contemplate this hot summer, first let’s talk about the simplest marker: money.

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The remarkable & wise Wretchard has revealed his identity.

Free & from the internet – this note describes a service motivated by the land grant’s mission. And, at its best, these institutions offer accessibility to current scholarship & practical delivery methods. Here it isn’t no-till methods but poetry.

American Life in Poetry is a free weekly column for newspapers and online publications featuring a poem by a contemporary American poet and a brief introduction to the poem by Ted Kooser. The sole mission of this project is to promote poetry, and we believe we can add value for newspaper and online readers by doing so.

This week’s column.

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From Mediacrity via Instapundit, we learn that Romenesko’s media column earns him $150K from the not-for-profit which sponsors him. That’s not too shabby (the money, I mean, not the column). We see in the Boston Globe that one poor guy settled for $5 to say nice things about an on-line florist.

Let me assure potential advertisers that as ardent capitalists, we Chicago Boyz can be bought. Any Dodge/Chrysler dealer with an extra one of these hanging around the lot can expect to read many favorable things about their product in exchange for one of them. That other guy would probably settle for a couple of chrome lug nuts, but sometimes quality costs more.

Two more things noted:

The bloggers mentioned have a rather cavalier attitude to disclosing their pay-for-play arrangements. We don’t do that; hence no links to the bloggers in the story.

And once again, the on-line version of a print media story on blogging appears with no hyperlinks, although they give some URLs. Sigh.